Customer notes
Hotel and venue guest notes
There are two completely different notes in hospitality and they are constantly confused. The in-room welcome note is read on arrival by somebody who has just travelled and wants to put their bag down. The posted note after a stay arrives when the guest is home and is the only one that affects whether they come back.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
In the room on arrival
[FIRST NAME] - welcome. The coffee in the tin is the good one, not the sachets. Anything at all, dial 9 and you get me rather than a call centre. [NAME], [ROLE]
Welcome back, [FIRST NAME]. Room [NUMBER] as requested, away from the lift. [NAME]
For a special occasion stay
[FIRST NAME] and [PARTNER NAME] - happy anniversary. [NUMBER] years is worth marking properly, so there is something in the fridge from us. Enjoy the weekend. [NAME], [ROLE]
Posted after the stay
Sent a week later, to the home address on the booking. Almost nobody does this, which is why it works.
[FIRST NAME],
Thank you for staying with us in [MONTH]. I gather the weather did its worst on the Saturday and you walked anyway, which is the right attitude.
No booking link attached to this. If you are ever back in [LOCATION], ring the property directly and ask for me.
[NAME], [ROLE]
To a guest who comes back regularly
[FIRST NAME],
That is [NUMBER] stays now. You are easier to look after than most and the team notice when you are on the arrivals list, which is not something I say in a form letter.
See you in [MONTH].
[NAME], [ROLE]
Getting it right
- What to mention. For in-room: their name, one practical thing, and nothing else. For a posted note: the specific stay, something that happened, and no booking link.
- What to leave out. A list of facilities in the welcome note, which is what the compendium is for. A review request in the posted note, which is the single most common way hotels waste this.
- How long. In-room 15 to 30 words. Posted 40 to 80 words.
- How personal. Hospitable rather than corporate. A note signed by the property rather than by a person is a brochure.
- When not to send one. After a stay with an unresolved complaint. Deal with that directly and separately; a warm note on top of an unanswered problem reads as not having read the file.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [PARTNER NAME], [MONTH], [NUMBER], [LOCATION].
Booking systems record the booker, not the guests. In-room notes addressed to the person who paid, in a room occupied by somebody else, are a recurring and avoidable embarrassment - particularly on a stay booked as a gift.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
In-room notes are written on the day by the team, and should be. The posted ones are the volume job: a property with sixty rooms has a few thousand past guests a year and no realistic way to write to them by hand.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap, hand-addresses the envelopes and lodges the run with Australia Post, or sends it back to you to release in waves.
Writing to guests after they have gone home? Price a guest run
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Writing more of these than you have evenings
Tell us roughly how many and what they say. We will come back with an exact price and a production window.